Cyber Trolls and the Ineluctability of Online Abuse

Originally posted on Medium by Julian Vigo

On 7 February, 2016, NYMag.com published Jesse Singal’s phenomenally researched and written article, “How the Fight Over Transgender Kids Got a Leading Sex Researcher Fired,” which details the mishandling of an investigation and the defamation of the target of this investigation, Dr. Kenneth Zucker, resulting in Zucker’s being sacked. But don’t stop at the comments below the article! They are tame compared to the Twitter abuse Singal faced in the days following the article’s publication. And no matter where you stand on the subject of transgenderism and children — a very controversial subject to be certain — the conscious misrepresentations of Singal’s meticulously researched 11,000 word article are as denigrative as they are exploitative of a social media that allows for critique to pass through 140 characters.